The House On The Borderland and Other Novels (Fantasy Masterworks) Book

The House on the Borderland and the other novels by William Hope Hodgson are among the indispensable works of gloomy cosmic fantasy--this is in spite of the utter mawkishness of his writing about the emotions and his occasional ill-judged experiments with an archaic style. The hero of The House on the Borderland finds himself besieged in his remote house by monstrous pig-like humanoids and carried forward, dizzyingly, to unimaginably distant eras when dying stars are drawn in on each other and dead gods hideously walk. The world of "The Night Land" is one of chivalric adventure in which the hero quests after the girl of his dreams across a literally sunless landscape full of monsters described through hints and indirection but nonetheless impressively deadly. Similar monsters beset the sailors of "The Boats of the Glen Carreg" and "The Ghost Pirates"--a case can be made that Hodgson is even more terrifying when he makes a concession to standard realism, but the two maritime adventure stories lack the sheer sense of Time's Abyss that he does so well. Despite the occasional longeurs of "The Night Land"--well characterised by China Mieville in his introduction as ones which would make any less important book unreadable--this is an impressive collection of fantastic classics. --Roz KaveneyRead More